DTD and W3 errors in rankings

[junglesnail]

I've been thinking about this in the last few days.

I used the W3 markup validator and checked a bunch of websites on different keywords and those without any errors ranked better than the other. ( this might help you also. )
Do you think that errors like writting <A href=""></A> instead of <a href=""></a> or forgetting to close some html tags may cause any problems with the website's rankings in google? Because after i checked more that 100 sites that's the result.

Also does the Document Type Declaration counts for search engines? I thought that this tag is used only to tell browsers the pages's type.

What do you think ?

[mattur]

Validation can help avoid indexing problems, but does not appear to affect ranking. Google wants to display the most relevant results to a query. Down-grading a highly relevant page because it had HTML errors (> 95% of all of pages on the web) would give sub-optimal results.

A badly malformed tag may prevent that tag's content from being indexed, so validation can be useful for your QA process. I would not expect using upper case tag identifiers (valid in HTML) or omitting some closing tags (some are optional in HTML) to affect ranking.

Doctypes [webmasterworld.com] are used to trigger layout modes in browsers and to provide a HTML definition to validate against for code validators, nothing else.

Previous discussions:

W3C Validation and Google SEO [webmasterworld.com]

My pages are now W3C validated. Will this help on the search engines? [webmasterworld.com]

Does google notice validation? [webmasterworld.com]

And lots more [google.co.uk] :)

[junglesnail]

Thanks for reply and sorry i didn't take a deep look through the older posts.

[mattur]

No problem junglesnail. I found another post [webmasterworld.com] that may be of interest from Google's Adam Lasnik - always good to get a definitive answer:

Validation errors from W3C, in and of themselves -- unless they are so material as to hamper our hardy Googlebot's reading of the site -- are extremely unlikely to harm a site's presence in our index.

[...] I certainly don't mean to denigrate the values of W3C validation; rather, I'm saying that in the context of Google crawling and indexing, this stuff shouldn't be a critical consideration.

HTH.